One after another the flying transports were overtaken, rammed, or blown up and sunk by the pitiless monsters which unceasingly darted hither and thither a few feet below the surface of the water, and in less than two hours after the first alarm had been given the last of the hundred transports which had sailed that morning from Alexandria had gone down a shattered wreck into the abysses of the Inland Sea. There was no chance of saving the drowning wretches who managed to escape from the eddies of the sinking ships, as there would have been in a naval battle of to-day. The air-ships could not do so without sinking to the waves, and so making themselves marks for the irresistible rams and torpedoes of their enemies, who themselves could not be merciful, even if they would, shut up as they were in the steel leviathans whose only use was destruction. Khalid the Magnificent, with a heart well-nigh breaking with rage and shame and sorrow, watched in passionate helplessness the destruction of his splendid fleet and the drowning, like rats in a pond, of the soldiers who were to have borne the banner of the Crescent over the conquered fields of Christendom. More than a million men had perished beneath his eyes, and he had not been able to fire a shot to help them, although he was in command of an aerial fleet which could have dispersed an army or wrecked a city between sunrise and noon. But the strangest part of the strange battle was yet to come. After the last of the transports had disappeared, the attack ceased and the assailants vanished. In a few minutes the sea was as calm and bright as ever, and only a few bits of broken wooden wreckage floating here and there betrayed the fact that anything out of the common had happened. The remnant of the Moslem squadron rose to the surface and signalled for instructions. Only twenty of them remained uninjured out of the hundred that had gone into the fight. Before the signals could be returned there was a loud hiss and a swirling noise as of some huge body rushing at a furious speed through the water, and a great battleship leapt up out of the nether waters, and hurled herself at a speed of nearly two hundred miles an hour into the midst of the floating squadron. [Illustration: A GREAT BATTLESHIP LEAPT UP OUT OF THE NETHER WATERS. _Page 266._] Her gleaming ram of azurine tore its way through the sides of three vessels in such swift succession that, almost before their fragments had time to sink, her huge bulk vanished under the waves again. But hardly was her work done than a second battleship charged into the paralysed squadron, sending two of its members to the bottom and crippling three more before she, too, vanished into the safe obscurity of the depths.